On Guardians and Gardens

There seems to be a lot of protesting going on today. Ever eager to facilitate your assimilation of the salient parts of the day’s news stories, Londonist has bunged a couple of vaguely outdoors related posts together and drawn our own spurious but fun conclusion.

Our beady eye was first drawn to the tale of protestors who are occupying quite a large part of Wembley Park Sports Ground in order to stop the local authority from building a new academy under one of these new-fangled public/private sponsorship deals. The matter has been to court and back and has been dragging on for eighteen month now, so the next stage is forcible removal. The tent people say that they do not approve of PPP, and that valued local facilities will be lost if the construction goes ahead. Londonist isn’t too sure about the inner city academy: most of the ones that we can see are bloody awful, but they do look good on paper. But we do know that tented occupations, which usually start with the best of intentions, quite often lose the plot a bit as time goes on, and that a bunch of community facilities being replaced by another community facility hardly seems like a crime against humanity or the planet.

The second story we spotted has unravelled in another green space, the leafy, lofty, carefully guarded communal gardens of Notting Hill. Some misguided member of the hoi polloi has suggested that the denizens of this other London might want to share their verdant enclaves with the rest of us. This has caused great consternation amongst residents, who claim that the facility is ‘built into the price of their houses’: ie they pay for their privileges and they wanna keep them.

The solution for all this development angst is obvious to us. The Wembley flash tenters (who will inevitably be decamped one way or t’other) should be re-housed in and around Kensington as guardians of the gardens, to fight for the residents and ensure that these exclusive little glades remain riff-raff free for the next generation. Londonist is sure that the residents will be happy to offer basic wash facilities to their new tenants in exchange for this enhanced peace of mind. Simple.

Garden taken from Incessant Flux's flickr stream under the Creative Commons Licence.